When the issue of abortion rises, fire storms with it, and anger and demonization follow in its wake. Lost in the heat of this battle is the sole reason for abortion: unwanted pregnancies.
My experience has opened me to both sides of this struggle, and to an understanding of both positions. I find abortions tragic, yet I see too the tragic way women have been treated in our society.
After long thought, I came to the realization that these two sides are not mutually exclusive, that you can stop unwanted pregnancies, and therefore abortions, while maintaining and in fact expanding upon the sovereign rights of women over their own bodies.
The first critical thing we must understand is that making abortions illegal will do little to stopping them from happening. Those with money will go to the same private clinics that they always have, while women who cannot afford such care will return to the dangerous methods that have killed many in the past. It may feel good to have a law making abortions illegal, but, as with many other such prohibitions, it will serve only to drive the practice underground. Therefore, I will not support laws that make abortion illegal.
What can we do to stop unwanted pregnancies?
Young people are going to be sexually active. We cannot ignore this. Therefore, we must provide healthy sex education that teaches kids how to not only keep from getting pregnant, but could possibly save their lives from sexually transmitted diseases .
If we deny access to birth control for young people, it is not going to stop them from having sex.
Many young people are pressured into having sex before they are emotionally ready. This effects boys as well as girls. We have to stop putting kids down, and start lifting them up. We need education in our schools that treats each child as an important individual that is cared for and respected, and we need to stop the subtle yet perversive notion that girls are less worthy than boys. When you lift the self esteem of a young girl, she will then be able to 'just say no'. When a young boy feels good about himself, he won't have to rush into having sex just to prove to his friends that he is a man.
Self respect, a feeling of self worth, is the best defense a child can have against the pressures the world will hurl against them.
Our United States federal budget doles out billions of dollars in welfare payments...not to the poor, but to the rich. Corporate welfare is a cancer that eats away at our pocket books and our democracy.
Corporations and their CEO's make high dollar donations to both of the political parties in power, in return they receive tax breaks and are dispensed money directly from the budget. Quid Pro Quo is the gentlest way of putting it.
Weapons makers, animal agriculture, chemical companies, pharmaceutical companies, the oil industry. All these and so many more drain resources from our budget that should instead be spent helping those who truly need help.
We need welfare reform. Corporate welfare reform.
One of the best way to reduce taxes in the long run is to pay off the trillion dollar debt that our government has acquired from years of deficit spending. Interest payments on the debt makes up a substantial amount of the current budget, and consumes a large chunk of our tax payments every year When we reduce the debt, we will free up resources that can be used to balance the current unfair tax system.
No one wants to pay taxes, but they should be paid for by those who can best pay them. Those who struggle to survive should not be burdened by a tax system that will do nothing but keep them in cycles of near poverty.
We have come to learn that a justice system that can be bought is a unjust system. It is not an issue of outright payment, such as in bribing judges and juries, but of the simple truth that in the court of law he who has the most money wins, because he can afford the best lawyers and legal team. Adversely, those who have no money often lose, because of cheap, incompetent legal representation.
The death penalty, the harshest, final punishment we can meet out is played by this system. There are no rich people on death row, though the wealthy surely commit capital crimes. As we have seen recently in Illinois, a number of poor people who were sentenced to death were exonerated; not by the justice system they were subjected to, but by a group of students at a university who were able to uncover their innocence.
Because of this basic flaw in the system, and even without the sincere moral objections to the state killing its' citizens, the death penalty should be abolished, and replaced with the severe sentence of life without parole.
Our country has now imprisoned more than 2,000,000 of its people. Most of these are non-violent drug offenders. We now have is a situation where prison building has become a market industry where private corporations profit from our judicial judgments. This is wrong. Prisons should first and foremost house those people to whom violence was their crime. Murderers, and Rapists, including those whose victims are children, should make the first tier of convicts, their terms made rock solid by the depravity of their crime. Not one should be displaced for overcrowding from unfair and illogical drug laws.
Non-violent drug abusers should get the treatment they need to help rebuild their lives. Any punishment given should be community service, so they can help those that they hurt, the prime victim being themselves.
I have long stood against drugs, and was strong enough and believed enough in myself to have never used them. But so many have used drugs in our society that if the laws were applied to every community equally, prison walls would have to be built around the cities we live in to house the guilty. And if they cannot be applied equally, where drug busts occur in rich neighborhoods or on Wall Street as well as in Trenton and Camden, then the law becomes meaningless.
This great hypocrisy is best seen in the forms of the two presidential candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties. We know both have been drug users, yet both these men, having not spent one day in jail for their crimes, push for stricter drug laws to punish those who don't share their fathers names, and the protection against the law that that afforded them.